Coal Secretary Anil Swarup has been appointed as school education secretary.
After getting Indian Oil Corporation, the nation's largest oil firm, to drop four independent directors and Engineers India Ltd to boot out two, it is now seeking to sack former Power Secretary P Uma Shankar, chartered accountant S Ravi and former BPCL Chairman R K Singh from the board of ONGC.
Ignoring objections by political parties, the government on Friday introduced a bill in Lok Sabha to clear legal hurdles in appointment of former Telephone Regulatory Authority of India Chairman Nripendra Misra who joined as principal secretary to Prime Minister Narendra Modi more than a month back.
Biennial elections are being held for 58 Rajya Sabha seats across several states and by-poll for one in Kerala.
Five months since her conviction by a Karnataka court and being forced to step down as Tamil Nadu CM, Jayalalithaa has not been out of her house. However, she continues to run the Tamil Nadu government with the help of a few retired bureaucrats reports R Ramasubramanian.
Hari Shankar Brahma, who took over as the 19th Chief Election Commissioner on Friday, said his priority and "mission objective" is to ensure free and fair conduct of Delhi assembly polls.
'The time has come to substitute the present Constitutional set-up with an alternative democratic framework,' argues B S Raghavan, the distinguished civil servant.
In her death, the Congress has lost a leader who brought old world grace to politics but was open to new ideas.
Steep taxes on petrol and diesel add to the cost of economic activity and reduce the Indian economy's competitiveness. The two fuels must be brought under GST's purview, suggests former IAS officer Ajay Shankar.
'The Modi Model we see now is still the old Gujarat Model.' 'But with an acknowledgement that governing India is more challenging than governing Gujarat,' notes Shekhar Gupta.
Former Gujarat Director General of Police R B Sreekumar, who had taken on Narendra Modi on fake encounter issue, on Tuesday filed a defamation and conspiracy case against the Bharatiya Janata Party prime ministerial candidate and other party leaders, accusing them of launching a malicious campaign against him by raking up the two-decade-old Indian Space Research Organisation spy case.
Asserting that there is nothing wrong in allocation of coal blocks, former Union Coal Secretary Prakash Chandra Parakh on Wednesday said if the Central Bureau of Investigation considers a conspiracy in this case then Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh should be held equally responsible being the final decision maker.
The SP candidates in these seats include Mulayam Singh Yadav's daughter-in-law Aparna Yadav and three ministers, one of whom was recently sacked.
'Renu Raj has exploded many civil services myths.' 'The popular belief is that unless they come from English speaking, sophisticated and affluent families, prepare at a young age, get educated in a first rate college, go to a coaching class in one of the metro cities, take the examination several times, the aspirants cannot make it to the civil services list, particularly its very top.' Ambassador T P Sreenivasan -- who serves in an honorary capacity at the NSS Academy where Renu coached for the IAS -- on how she surprised even herself by topping the UPSC exam.
Like Nehru, Modi is loathe to touch the public sector. His policy towards Israel leans towards 'non-alignment'. You can find other similarities: frequent public speeches, personalised leadership, total control over foreign and strategic policies, even stylised dressing, says Shekhar Gupta.
'I have nothing more to lose. My three sons were killed. I am not going to sit silent.'
The illegal snooping row intensified on Monday with the Bharatiya Janata Party rejecting Congress demand for a probe by a sitting Supreme Court judge and the ruling party accusing Narendra Modi of heading a "fascist" set up in Gujarat under which a woman was allegedly ordered to be stalked.
'Only the smoke is coming out now. Let us prevent the lava from coming out by taking proper measures.' 'I have told every leader that you cannot have a stable government without winning the confidence of the scheduled castes, scheduled tribes and the most backward castes.' 'Leaders feel that by giving a sop here and there and by symbolic actions, they can win votes. That's all they want. Votes.'
Some of the 19 NIT scholars who spent a week at the Rashtrapati Bhawan as part of an 'in-Residence Programme' share their learnings with Upasna Pandey
'A foot-in-mouth disorder seems to grip the government, and is growing chronic by the day,' says Sunil Sethi.
The office of Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal's Principal Secretary was on Tuesday raided by the Central Bureau of Investigation in a corruption case, triggering a fresh face-off between the Aam Aadmi Party and the Centre and a vicious political slugfest in which the AAP chief spewed venom against Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
The pipeline for well-qualified and experienced policy economists at senior levels of government has broken, leading to a growing dearth of suitable candidates for top economist positions.
In the third reshuffle since coming to power, Prime Minister Modi raised the strength of his Council of Ministers from 73 to 76.
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Arvind Kumar Sharma, a 1988-batch IAS officer and one of the many joint secretaries in PMO, definitely wields some power.
The 'Raj Bhavan/Nakkeeran Gopal case', in which editor S Gopal was arrested in the morning and set free by the court in the afternoon, is not the first one where the Tamil Nadu's once-reputed police force is seen as faltering in the eye of the law, says N Sathiya Moorthy.
If an elected government had been sworn in, Jung's tenure and the government would have been more or less co-terminus and Jung would have been just the ceremonial head of Delhi. Now, he will run Delhi, pending another round of assembly elections, says Aditi Phadnis
As pressure mounted on him to quit as the chief of West Bengal Human Rights Commission over a sexual assault allegation, former Supreme Court judge Ashok Kumar Ganguly on Tuesday said he was "undecided" on his future course of action.
The negotiations started on Sunday, a day ahead of schedule.
Obviously, the not-so warm vibes between the two during the recent election season is a thing of the past, with Jaya scheduled to offer the Tamil angavastram as a mark of respect to Modi in his South Block office.
HPCL is now ready to increase the stake of the state government up to 49 per cent.
'The cooperation of Yakub with the investigating agencies after he was picked up informally in Kathmandu and his role in persuading some other members of the family to come out of Pakistan and surrender constitute, in my view, a strong mitigating circumstance to be taken into consideration while considering whether the death penalty should be implemented,' B Raman had written in August 2007.
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